Fears that the world is running out of redheads have scientists and fans of carrot tops firing back.

As activists lobby to include the mighty white polar bear on the endangered species list, a critter of a different colour is nervously contemplating its own uncertain future.

The red-headed homo sapiens, predicted by some to be extinct within 100 years, is fighting back with an exclusive dating site, established to keep the rare and fiery breed alive and kicking forever.

As happens every few years, rumours are once again circulating that the world's population of redheads is rapidly thinning.

Because the production of red hair involves a recessive gene, it's important that they propagate with each other, insists the new social networking site redhedd.com.

When news broke last week that Nicole Kidman, the ginger-haired actress and star of Moulin Rouge, had been knocked up by her dirty blond Aussie husband Keith Urban, it struck a discouraging blow to the plight of red-head survivalists.

While other sites devoted to redheads such as Redhead Passions and Realm of Redheads provide a meeting place for people who admire the fiery hair colour, redhedd.com takes a more aggressive stance. Its manifesto – "to save the redheads."

Time is running out. And it's a matter of life and death.

Redhedd.com was founded last spring by Steve Warrington of Ann Arbor, MI.

The site was created "in reaction to stories I had heard about redheads going extinct," says Warrington, contacted by email. But even he acknowledges much of the doomsday science lacks veracity.

Regardless, he has a plan.

"In order to save redheads we have to mingle redheads with redheads, to concentrate the two genes that make red hair," the site instructs.

"I am quite serious about hooking up redheads with other redheads. At 2 per cent of the population, even if we weren't going extinct, that seems like too little of a really great thing," he said in an email. To be fair, much of redhedd.com's presentation style is delivered tongue-in-cheek.

"The first step is to intra-marry. The second is to inter-marry," advises the site. In other words, to get their numbers up, they've go to concentrate their efforts within the group at first – then spread out.

Even as their numbers fall the site's organizers insist they can reverse the "red is dead" trend with their "spread the red" program.

While the number of redheads seem to be dwindling, that can change, claims Warrington.

Fiona Maclean runs a horse boarding facility north of Toronto. She was born in Canada but her family roots go back to the Inverness area of Scotland, where redheads are not so rare. The auburn-haired Maclean recalls being taunted with "carrot top" and "ginger nut," as a child.

"As I got older I grew to accept it. You come to realize, especially when you travel, how different it is," she says. Over the years Maclean has often heard the stories that her hair colour is becoming extinct. But she has never been alarmed.

"I'm actually surprised by the number of redheaded children I see in the Toronto area," says Maclean. She also thinks there may be more redheads in our midst that we think. "A lot of redhead adults are colouring their hair – blonde," she says.

A recent National Geographic article commented on the growing number of news reports that the world is running out of redheads, "since carriers of the carrot top gene are less and less likely to pair up in an age of global intermingling (a child usually needs a copy from each parent to get the red result)."

About 2 per cent of the world's population is estimated to be natural redheads and only about 4 per cent of people possess the gene.

But for every scientist who predicts it's closing time for redheads, there's a researcher who insists the doomsday evidence is flawed – that the predominance of red hair may thin, but it will always lurk quietly in the genome, "rearing up far from its frigid origins, in far-flung places like Jamaica, a tip of the hat from a fiery Scottish forebear," as the National Geographic article concluded.

The University of Rochester Medical Center's David Pearce, as associate professor with a PhD in biochemistry and genetics, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the red hair gene "will dilute" but "there are a variety of other factors that can change hair colour that are not really understood well right now."

Writer Jacob Silverman researched the furor for the website howstuffworks.com.

"Red hair is caused by a mutation in the MC1R (melanocortine 1 receptor) gene," he wrote. "It's also a recessive trait, so it takes both parents passing on a mutated version of the MC1R gene to produce a redheaded child.

``Because it's a recessive trait, red hair can easily skip a generation. It can then reappear after skipping one or more generations if both parents, no matter their hair colour, carry the red hair gene."

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